Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Thomas Merton: The Only Known Photograph of God

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

A Dance to the Secrets of Time and Motion: The Pendulum Wave

Notice that at first the swinging balls form a line, then fall out of sync, forming snakes, squiggles and spirals. Our brains are wired to predict everyday behavior. We need math to understand this. Yet the world blunders on, trusting what is comfortably predictable.

Bats & Echolocation: Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable. It depends on your point of view.

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

We are all conceived in close prison, and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death. . .
But we sleep all the way. From the womb to the grave, we are never thoroughly awake.(John Donne, Sermons)

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

3/11/09

You Can Improve Your Life (And That's Not A Platitude)

Back when I was in college, back in the days of the Cold War and foreign policies based on MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, I was introduced to the wide world as a rather dismal place. Camus told me that life was meaningless and that, like Sisyphus, all I could do was heroically roll a boulder to the top of a mountain for the rest of my life. Fred Hoyle had me believing that the universe had no origin, was in a steady state, without beginning and end, and was therefore godless. Because Einstein had shown that Newton's matter was not the basic stuff of gravity, like others I was persuaded that all was determined, including the course of my life. B.F. Skinner told me that I was like a pigeon in one of his boxes, governed by stimulus and response, devoid of any inner meaning, including freedom and dignity. Freud said my unconscious was a snake pit of repressed desires to sleep with my mother, and urges to kill my father. He said that I, and civilization with its discontents, could only hope to escape neuroses and find ordinary unhappiness.

Current wisdom has each of these perspectives as out-of-date. I learned slowly, painfully, to question the intellectual fashions of the day. Platitudes are never fashionable and some contain important truths.

Like others of my college generation, I was not inclined to look on the world as warm and cozy. That is still the case for undergraduates today, and right they are, although they can find a counterpoint that was not available to me. It is available to everybody, not just them.

I speak of positive psychology, which holds that one trouble with the world is that people do not work to make their lives happy. I don't speak here of Pollyanna and Panglosse, but of reasonable optimism. Reasonable in that we expect our lives will encounter trials and tribulations, but that we eventually will leave them behind.

Martin Seligman, a major spokesman for the movement, points out studies showing that people who dwell on negative experiences become increasingly negative. In contrast, others experience an improved sense of well-being when they keep "gratitude journals" in which they remind themselves of all they're thankful for.

Happiness requires steady and habitual plugging away at it. Negative feelings are easy to fall into, a path of least resistance. The more we dwell on them the more we return to them and the deeper we sink. Freudian analysis encouraged patients to introspect but they did not improve. The more they looked inward, the more they looked inward, despite insights into their behavor.

Still, for all his wrong-headedness elsewhere, Freud did acknowledge that "unhappiness is much less difficult to experience." He could not see his psychoanalytic method as a cause of discontent, which it was.

Those of an intellectual bent may expect meaty ideas in the teachings of positive psychology, but they would be disappointed. In part, happiness research finds truth behind age-worn platitudes and shows that their significance can become elements of a working program. (Research has found that life satisfaction is unusually high in Ireland, where people remind one another to "count your blessings.") Remember your mother telling you to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Your father told you to stop crying over spilt milk. You may say that's nothing new and that you already observe some platitudes.

Something new is here, and it is available to anybody willing to make the effort. In studying and applying positive psychology, you begin to understand more than what your parents used to tell you. You see more than the platitudes.

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
On John Van Druten's gravestone

Martians are discussing humans, after one of them has visited Earth:
"These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they're made out of meat. . . .They're meat all the way through."
"No brain?"
"Oh, there is a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat."
"So . . .what does the thinking?"
"You're not understanding, are you? The brain does the thinking. The meat."
"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"
"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal. Are you getting the picture?"
(From "They're Made out of Meat" by Terry Bisson. Of such a contention, Colin McGinn says we are not equipped to explain the experience of consciousness.)

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

God and the Devil are talking, looking down at the desert where one of God's chosen is having a sacred vision. "You see," says God.” Now you will be out of business because my child has realized the Truth."Not at all," says the Devil. "I will help him organize it."

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after. Ernest HemingwayI can imagine Jack The Ripper also saying this. John